In Praise Of... Louder Than Love

A salute to Soundgarden's second album, released 25 years ago today

Let me take you on a short walk down memory lane.

It's the summer of 1990, and this
writer finds himself on a date with a young lady in Douglas, on the
Isle of Man. Both parties are working on the island during the
holiday season, and staying in the same hotel, and as the evening has
been rather agreeable a night-closing drink in a hotel room seems
appropriate. Conversation turns to music, namely the music that has
been blasting at obnoxious volume from the tape deck in our room for
the duration of the summer.

“Do you guys only listen to heavy
metal?” the young lady enquires.

“Not entirely,” comes the reply.
“Faith No More and Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden aren't heavy
metal bands, you see. To you, they might sound like heavy metal
bands, but they're doing something different, something smarter and
darker and more subversive.”

To prove this undeniable argument, I
press 'Play' on the tape deck, which currently contains a cassette of
Soundgarden's second album Louder Than Love. With unfortunate timing,
the cassette is cued up on a track on side two called Big Dumb Sex.

Soundgarden always did confuse people.
Formed in 1984 with the aim of being “Black Sabbath without the
parts that suck”, the group had a polarising effect on the Seattle
rock community, who couldn't quite decide whether their dirgey
Sabbath/Stooges/Zeppelin inspired-sound was a lusty celebration of
classic rock or a straight-faced piss-take. Naturally, Chris Cornell
and Kim Thayil never apologised and never explained. When the group
quit America's most respected punk rock label SST to become the first
band from their peer group to sign to a major label (A&M),
suspicions of their motivations and intentions only intensified. And
that's before anyone had heard their new music.

Given the context in which it was made,
and the career moves which subsequently followed – most notably the
quartet's decision to tour with Guns N' Roses in 1991 – it has
become fashionable to claim that Louder Than Love was Soundgarden's
attempt to edge closer to the rock mainstream. This is revisionist
nonsense. A full two years before 'The Year That Punk Broke', the
mainstream was Pump, Dr.
Feelgood, Skid Row and Sonic Temple, and though a new 'alternative'
sensibility - spearheaded by NIN, FNM, Dinosaur Jr., Jane's Addiction
and Sonic Youth – was gaining traction, Louder Than Love was a
particularly obtuse and awkward release, even by the standards of the
latter group. Bassist Hiro Yamamoto's agonisingly uncomfortable I
Awake (opening line: “Woke up depressed, I left for work, you have
a good day, it's not your fault”) is possibly the album's most
off-kilter composition, but there are unconventional, unorthodox
ideas at play throughout, from Kim Thayil's one-note drone guitar
which runs for a full two minutes through opener Ugly Truth, to the
lurching time signature and tempo changes destabilising Gun, through
to the creepy spoken word drawl running beneath Cornell's melody
lines in the deeply ironic hair metal piss-take Big Dumb Sex.

Crucially though Louder Than Love marks
the point at which Cornell began to assume the dominant role in the
band. Where the songwriting credits on 1988's Ultramega OK were
evenly split between the singer, Thayil and Yamamoto, Cornell's
contributions are given increased weighting on the band's second
album ( a situation which hastened Yamamoto's departure from the
group) and it's these tracks – Ugly Truth, Loud Love and
Uncovered, in particular – which shine brightest from the sludge.
The addition of Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron's blossoming as a
songwriter of note would alter Soundgarden's group dynamic again on
1991's Badmotorfinger, but here Cornell emerged as the band's focal
point at precisely the point where MTV's 120 Minutes had identified a
new breed of charismatic figureheads - Patton, Reznor and Farrell among them - on
the fringes of the mainstream. Louder Than Love didn't set the world
on fire, peaking at number 108 on the Billboard 200, but it
pushed Soundgarden to the front of a new musical vanguard whose
influence would be keenly felt in the decade that followed its
release. No-one's favourite Soundgarden album, it's nonetheless a
work of great significance, one of the cornerstones of the new
alternative nation. The Seattle quartet would gain greater poise and
power, but Louder Than Love marks the point at which they
transitioned from ungainly local heroes to self-aware architects of
their own future. The times they were a-changing.